A new biography by Peter Ames Carlin traces the life of Bruce
Springsteen from New Jersey nobody to champion of Barack Obama. In this
extract, he examines a pivotal year for the singer

During the Eighties, Bruce Springsteen conquered the world on the back of his best-selling album Born in the USA. But as the decade ended, Springsteen found himself at a a personal and professional crossroads. Here he talks about breaking up his musical family – the E Street Band – while embarking on life as a father…

On October 18, 1989, Bruce sat down with his address book and a task he’d both feared and fantasised about for most of the decade: breaking up the E Street Band. “I think we got into a rut,” he says. “Relationships got a little muddy, through co-dependence, or whatever. Probably that aggravated everyone a little bit. I needed to take a break, do some other things, probably play with some other musicians, which I hadn’t done in a long time.

“So I called the guys up and talked to them as best I could. I never looked at it as the band being done or kaput or finished. But it was a call that said, 'I’m gonna do something else, and you’re not gonna be a part of it for a while.’ And that was very difficult for the guys and me.”

The suspicions that drummer Max Weinberg and the others felt at that last show on the two-year, world-conquering Born in the USA tour turned out to be exactly right.

“I just didn’t know where to take the band next,” Bruce reflects. “It seemed like we’d reached an apex of what we were trying to do and say.” Some found it easier to accept than others. Garry Tallent, for one, noticed that absence of finality in what Bruce had to say. “He never said he was breaking up the band,” the bassist says. “It seemed like a very nice, gracious call.”

Guitarist Nils Lofgren, who had started his sideman career working with the always unpredictable Neil Young, didn’t blink. “You gotta understand that this guy had spent his whole life playing with the same seven people,” he says. “No matter how good they are, you want to play with other people, try some different things.”

Weinberg had seen it coming. “You would have had to be completely blind not to notice there were major changes coming here,” he says. But the news was still “unrelentingly depressing”.

Clarence Clemons got the call in Japan, where he, along with Lofgren, was touring with Ringo Starr’s first All Starr Band. As Clemons remembered, Bruce sounded so casual, he assumed he was being called back to E Street. “I picked up the phone and heard him say, 'Hey, Big Man!’ I said, 'Hey, Boss!’ And he said, 'Well, it’s all over.’ I said, 'Oh, uh, OK,’ because I thought he meant the Ringo tour was over, and I had to come back home to go into the studio or start another tour.” The sax player said he’d get home and check in as soon as possible, but then Bruce set him straight. “He said, 'Naw, naw, naw. I’m breaking up the band.’ ”

Bruce recalls talking to Clemons for a while. “I had the kid gloves on delivering what I knew would be very bad news.” But Clemons was juggling his surprise and grief with a sudden urge to reduce his hotel room to ruins. So many years on the road, so much sacrifice, the thousands of hours spent waiting for Bruce to hear just the right sound from the recording studio speakers. “And I’m thinking, 'It’s all for this? My whole life dedicated to this band, this situation, this man, and what he believes in, then I’m out of town and I get a f---ing phone call?’ ”

Fortunately, he was in the company of Ringo Starr, who had experienced his own traumatic break-up when the Beatles imploded in 1970. And it wasn’t long before Clemons simply accepted the change for what it was. “Something in the back of my psyche said, 'This is OK. He’ll come back. Because anything so great cannot be destroyed altogether. Anything the goddess created can’t be thrown away. It’ll come back.’ ”

Then, just before Thanksgiving 1989, Bruce and Patti learnt that she was carrying their first child. A son, Evan James, was born in the evening of July 24. As he watched from the side, a surge of feeling burst against a part of himself Bruce had kept locked down since he was old enough to know how to protect himself.

“I got close to a feeling of a real, pure, unconditional love with all the walls down,” he told music writer David Hepworth. “All of a sudden, what was happening was so immense that it just stomped all the fear away for a little while, and I remember feeling overwhelmed. But I also understood why you’re so frightened. When that world of love comes rushing in, a world of fear comes in with it.”

It was a moment Bruce had imagined, described, and sung about for years. “My music over the last five years has dealt with those almost primitive issues. It’s about somebody walking through that world of fear so that he can live in the world of love.”

Bruce and Patti made their bond official at a backyard wedding the next spring, and their daughter, Jessica Rae, was born on December 30, 1991. “I had to change old attitudes and leave a lot of fears behind,” Bruce told USA Today’s Edna Gundersen in 1995. But he called having a family “the birth of my second life”.

Not that he could shake off every shadow. Living in LA, Bruce and Patti were about an hour-long commuter plane ride from the house he’d bought his parents in Belmont, a pleasant suburb about 10 minutes down Highway 101 from San Mateo.

The anger between father and son had largely faded, thanks both to the passage of time and other less expected developments. A stroke Doug suffered in 1979 had somehow rewired the part of his personality that made it all but impossible for him to share his emotions. “Now he couldn’t hide anything,” Pam Springsteen says. “You could mention any of his kids’ names to him, and he’d burst into tears. You could see what meant the most to him. He was just a very real person. No pretence, no persona. And everyone loved him.”

When Bruce held his own son in his lap a few years later, Patti noticed that her husband hadn’t read a word of the picture book he held. Instead he’d hold up the book so he and Evan could both see it, and then, after a minute or two of silence, turn the page so they could look at the next picture. Patti, puzzled, said. “You’re not reading it to him!” Bruce shrugged. “This,” he explained, “is how Springsteen men read.”

'Bruce’ by Peter Ames Carlin is out today, published by Simon & Schuster